food and survival

As any mother knows, food is essential to well-being and survival. Produce more food and more people will appear. Furthermore, more will survive into adulthood and more will reproduce and have healthy offspring. Food is the single most important contributor to longer and healthier lives. Well-fed people get sick less and often, and when they do, they survive better than those who are not. The main reason we have so many people on the planet today is because the Green Revolution of the 1950s produced so much excess food. That food was produced thanks to a wealth of cheap fossil fuels.

But food alone is not enough and food prices do matter. If people cannot make a profit, food ends up being wasted. Farmers have thrown away food time and again when they felt their margins were insufficient. As for feeding the world, there has always been enough food to feed everyone alive, but the number of hungry has stayed more or less the same throughout. These people are hungry, not because there is a lack of food, but because they cannot afford to buy it. They starve while we in the West battle with obesity.

Given how world economies work, producing more food will not solve the hunger problem, ever. If we make good food available for cheap prices, then people will quickly reproduce more and more of their offspring will survive. That will lead to higher demand and at some point production improvements, which are rather linear, won't be able to keep up with population growth, which is more exponential in nature.

Chances are things will get worse, a lot worse, before they get better. We already have a severe food crisis and instability is rising around the globe. Prices are rising because of increasing fuel costs, the lure of biofuels, and the increasing demand for higher quality, lower yield items such as beef. All these have some relationship to global warming or remedies for global warming, and all will continue to cause deterioration in the food supply for decades to come. The days of cheap fuel are over and so are the days of cheap food.

Many important food sources are also overextended. Fish stock are at capacity or past capacity and some have predicted the oceans will be empty within 50 years. Given how many people depend on fish as a source of protein, massive starvation is likely to ensue. But global warming -whether man made or not- is also going to rear its ugly face. Some of the best food producers of today are likely to suffer the most. Countries like India will be affected in major ways and that will have repercussions around Asia. With over a billion people, most of them young, and many educated with access to technology, this could give rise to a rather interesting fight.

Already the anger of the world is directly almost exclusively at the US. Many high level foreign officials have used bad words to describe our venture into biofuels. Lots of people around the world look at America as a nation of overweight individuals driving around in oversized cars who show no sign of concern for their starving neighbors. Oh no, rather than help, the Americans are now growing and burning food in their oversized engines to sustain their bad driving habits. And with Congress looking to please constituents in an election year, don't expect anything but more money going into biofuels.

Many Americans are aware of the deteriorating status the country enjoys abroad. But too few are paying attention to this next wave of anti-American sentiment that is building. How would you feel if you saw people hoarding corn for their SUV while your family is starving to death?